LAURENZ BERGES

Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf presents Laurenz Berges, one of the last students of Bernd Becher, whose photographic work has been exhibited particularly in the last years in a series of group exhibitions for example in New York, Brussels or recently in Leverkusen.Within the exhibition at Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, early works, photos that have been generated in the hinterland of Berlin, are confronted with newest positions. Thus an overview of developments and diverse forms of expression are communicated.Superficially examined the photographs of Berges show empty spaces and those that are used no longer. But the artist doesn?t choose his motifs arbitrarily. Old, abandoned Russian barracks in Eastern Germany, vacated localities in lignite areas in Western Germany are penetrated like memory stores. Here he follows traces of long-disappeared inhabitants. However Berges is not documenting the decline of the former being. His photographs fragment the gaze in sections, in the depiction of details. He arranges broken shelfs, left curtains or casts of removed furniture into representatives of long-forgotten realities and identities. One could say that Berges is abstracting the depicted to visualise the former inhabitants and their motions in life behind or better in the functional superficiality of things. He concentrates the traces of everyday past, the elusive and the casual towards an own poetic reality. The pictures of Laurenz Berges are penetrated by a gently melancholy. They offer a depth of focus in which the visual is not reduced to the captured absolute moment but in which the former being is always perceptible. Berges evolves his photographs into resonating cavities of elapsed, everyday life, into mirrors of lived and experienced reality.